As Afghanistan war wanes, ungoverned spaces remain

President Barack Obama’s major foreign policy message in his State of the Union address on Tuesday is expected to be that 2014 will mark the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

But the president’s pronouncement will come with a bitter irony: Even after a dozen years, more than $1 trillion and the loss of thousands of American lives, the basic danger that prompted President George W. Bush to invade not only remains but, many national security watchers argue, is more alarming than ever.

Text Size

-

+

reset

The threat of terrorists using ungoverned spaces to target the U.S., one of the central rationales for launching the invasion of Afghanistan and the bid to dismantle the Taliban, remains a very present danger, with Syria, western Iraq and parts of Africa and Afghanistan itself all potential nightmares.

What’s changed is that Americans and most of their leaders in Washington have exhausted their willingness to deal with such problems using major military interventions. So if the threat from Al Qaeda is “metastasizing,” as many in national-security Washington like to say, the doctrine that has emerged from Obama’s time in office is that America must learn how to respond without resorting to the large-scale military action that has so far defined much of the 21st century.

“Can the U.S. do, unilaterally, anything about most of the ungoverned spaces around the world? If the answer is we’re going to do Iraq or Afghanistan every time, we’re going to run out of troops and money very quickly,” said Mike Breen, executive director of the Truman National Security Project.

“Ungoverned spaces, or poorly governed spaces, are not conducive to a good global security environment,” Breen said. “However the impulse to say … the solution is military action? I think we need to be very respectful of the limits of that, based on our experience.”

The president and top members of his administration say they get it. They point to Obama’s speech last year at National Defense University and remarks by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, both before and after he got his job, about the practical “limits” of American power. But that doesn’t make the daily reality any easier to live with or the basic principles of American foreign policy, from Bush through Obama, any easier to explain in a coherent way.

The danger from Syria, for example, seems likely to linger for a long time. And it’s exactly the kind of danger that, in the wake of Sept. 11, was deemed by Republicans and Democrats to be unacceptable.

“As long as that conflict is going on, as long as people are learning how to kill other people and meeting really bad people, it’s going to be a big worry,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters recently.

“The conflict in Syria has attracted so many people from so many places, of so many motivations, including Americans, that it is an enormous challenge for all intelligence services, including the FBI, to identify the ones of bad intent,” he said. “To figure out where they’re going, why they’re going and to keep track of them. It’s something we’re spending a lot of time on.”

The new FBI director told reporters at his office that the FBI has a relatively good handle on Americans who’ve traveled back and forth to Syria, or made the attempt, but knows much less about the many others involved with or displaced by the conflict, including refugees moving up into Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East.

People inside the counterterrorism world have compared it to Afghanistan in the 1980s, Comey said, “but in some ways it’s more worrisome.” Syria is easier to reach, more people are involved, and the population is much more diverse, he said.

Another potential Afghanistan, hawks worry, is Afghanistan.

The House Armed Services Committee’s top two Republicans have urged the president not to make good on his threat to withdraw all U.S. troops by the end of the year.

“Just turn and look at what has happened with Iraq,” said Texas Rep. Mac Thornberry, the committee’s vice chairman. “We cannot afford to have that sort of vacuum happen in Afghanistan, because it presents real danger to us.”